A contentious campaign to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers by flooding their sites with data has been dropped.

Lycos Europe's Make Love, Not Spam campaign began in late November but its tactics proved controversial.

Lycos has shut down the campaign saying it had been started to stimulate debate about anti-spam measures and had now achieved this aim.

The anti-spammer screensaver came under fire for encouraging vigilante activity and skirting the edge of the law.

Sites swamped

Through the Make Love, Not Spam website, users could download a screensaver that would endlessly request data from the net sites mentioned in many junk mail messages.

More than 100,000 people are thought to have downloaded the screensaver that Lycos Europe offered.

The company wanted to keep the spam sites running at near total capacity to make it much less financially attractive to spammers to operate the sites.

But the campaign was controversial from the moment it kicked off and many net veterans criticised it for using spamming-type tactics against the senders of junk mail.

Some net service firms began blocking access to the Lycos Europe site in protest at the action.

Monitoring firm Netcraft found that the anti-spam campaign was proving a little too successful.

According to response-time figures gathered by Netcraft, some of the sites that the screensaver targeted were being knocked offline by the constant data requests.

In a statement from Lycos Europe announcing the s****ping of the scheme, the company denied that this was its fault.

"There is nothing to suggest that Make Love, Not Spam has brought down any of the sites that it has targeted," it said.

"At the time that Netcraft measured the sites it claims may have been brought down, they were not in fact part of the Make Love, Not Spam attack cycle," it added.

The statement issued by Lycos also said that the centralised database it used ensured that traffic to the target sites left them with 5% spare capacity.

Full story bbc.co.uk (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4073547.stm)

[ 09. December 2004, 20:21: Message edited by: Neteru ]

Nicky

09-12-04, 22:22

Originally posted by Neteru:
*I'm a bit late on this onehttp://www.tombraiderforums.com/forums/icons/icon8.gif http://www.quillicreality.com/smilies/whip.gif

Neteru

10-12-04, 11:40

You wicked woman :D

Nicky

10-12-04, 11:53

http://nicky.tombraiderforums.com/smilies/comfort.gif

Neteru

10-12-04, 12:18

Augh see, you know you can win me over when you post that now. You have the magic touch :D

SMSL

10-12-04, 12:46

That, and a bunch of smileys I don't know from where! :D

Nicky

10-12-04, 12:55

Originally posted by Neteru:
Augh see, you know you can win me over when you post that now. You have the magic touch :D Awww... :D Here, have some vegemite too http://www.tombraiderforums.com/images/smilies/jumper.gif http://www.tombraiderforums.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif